Russell Contreras

And in that phenomenon, there have been cases along the border where you had relations between Border Patrol agents and community members that could be adversarial.

Think about how the city of Memphis, where you have a black community interacting with black officers, and yet there's still allegations of excessive force.

So it's not unusual in the Southwest.

I think it's disconcerting for folks outside the border regions to see Border Patrol agents and ICE agents patrolling who are actually Latino, who have accents, who not just a Spanish accent, but have a Chicano accent.

It is no surprise that this is happening with the border patrol that are facing accusations when say Philadelphia police or Baltimore police or Detroit police could be facing the same thing.

When you have consent decrees about excessive force in those departments, often discrimination is cited, police behavior is cited, and race is a factor.

even if you have a diverse police force.

So that's not a magic wand.

We're going to get more Latinos into Border Patrol.

Therefore, we're going to solve this history of Border Patrol's perception, who, by the way, was created in the 1920s with some former Klansmen joining the Border Patrol.

And some were members of the Texas Rangers who were involved in the lynching of Black people at the turn of the century.

That's how the Border Patrol was created.

And then over the time, it got modernized and you got professionalized and you've got a diverse force.

So it changed its perception of how it really was created, was to keep Chinese immigrants out of the United States.

And it was racialized to now something fundamentally different, curving the border.

But yet you still have accusations that there's still racial profiling going on.

Yeah, I mean, Mexican-Americans, especially on the border, we've lived in perpetual foreignness, meaning we've always been foreign, no matter how many years, like I'm fourth generation and with the name Russell.

But yet even I have to make a case about how American I am.

This is a phenomenon when you go down the border and you visit Mexico, as we did as kids.

I lived in Houston, and we'd go to the border, say Laredo, and you'd cross over.